I once took a batch of cuttings from a healthy, established collection right at the peak of summer heat, feeling confident because the parent plants themselves looked perfectly fine in those conditions. Every single cutting failed, not dramatically, just a slow, quiet shriveling over several weeks with no rooting whatsoever. At the time I assumed … Read more
I spent an embarrassingly long time propagating a clustering Haworthia the hard way, taking individual leaf cuttings from a plant that was practically begging to be divided instead. The offsets were already there, already rooted into the same root mass as the parent, already essentially independent plants sharing a pot. Instead of simply separating them, … Read more
I once watched a beautifully variegated Echeveria I’d been growing for over a year slowly revert, one leaf at a time, back to plain green, as if the plant were quietly erasing the exact trait I’d paid a premium for. My first instinct was that I’d done something wrong, too much fertilizer, wrong light, some … Read more
I once received a small envelope of Lithops seeds from a grower overseas, seeds I’d been genuinely excited about for weeks, only to have essentially none of them germinate. At the time I assumed the batch itself had been poor quality, maybe an unsuccessful pollination or seeds harvested too early. It wasn’t until a later … Read more
The first time I attempted a micro-cutting on a genuinely slow-growing Haworthia, I approached it exactly the way I’d approach propagating a fast, forgiving Echeveria, take a decent-sized leaf, let it callus, set it on soil, wait. Nothing happened for months. Not rot, not growth, just a slowly desiccating leaf that eventually shriveled into nothing … Read more
I mentioned earlier in this series how heartbreaking it can be to watch a variegated succulent slowly revert to solid green, and propagation is really where that heartbreak most often begins. It’s one thing to grow a stable, established variegated plant carefully enough to preserve its pattern. It’s a considerably trickier thing to take that … Read more
There’s a particular kind of anxiety that sets in during the first few weeks after taking a cutting from a genuinely rare, hard-to-replace plant, checking almost daily for some sign that the process is actually working. I understand that impulse well, because I’ve felt it plenty of times myself, hovering over a tray of leaves … Read more
My “nursery” started as a single shelf by a window, then became a folding table in a spare corner, and eventually turned into a dedicated setup that now takes up a genuinely embarrassing amount of space in what used to be a guest room. I didn’t plan any of this deliberately, and looking back, I … Read more
A few years ago, a friend deep into the collector scene mentioned she’d bought a “lab-grown” Haworthia, and I remember being a little skeptical about what that actually meant for the plant’s quality and character. Since then, I’ve watched tissue culture shift from a slightly niche, somewhat mysterious topic in collector circles to something increasingly … Read more
My first successful graft happened almost by accident, a crested Euphorbia cutting I’d been given that was clearly too delicate, too slow, and too chlorophyll-poor to survive well on its own roots. A more experienced grower talked me through grafting it onto a sturdier rootstock, and watching that fragile, unpromising piece of tissue transform into … Read more